This invention is directed to a conveyor and transfer system and more particularly to a system having a first conveyor that transports a food product in an end to end arrangement and then transfers the food product to a second conveyor where the food product is staged for packaging in a side-by-side arrangement.
Transporting food product to a loader is known in the art. Presently, when food products such as sausages or hotdogs are made and taken from an oven the product must be conveyed to a loader to be loaded into a packaging machine. For certain types of loaders the food product is conveyed in an end to end arrangement. With present systems, consecutive food products must have a minimum distance between them for proper transfer from an end to end to a side-by-side orientation. Product supply may be sporadic and must be corrected before entering the loading or packaging machine. Present systems use buffering or indexing to account for this.
High speed physical contact commonly damages fragile sausages. Handling performance is also adversely affected by inconsistent surface conditions of the sausage. Therefore, a need exists in the art for a conveyor system that addresses these deficiencies.
An objective of the present invention is to provide a food product handling system that delivers fragile products in an organized and consistent manner.
Another objective of the present invention is to convert irregular spacing of products to regular spacing for flow regulation without the use of accumulation or indexing.
Another objective of the present invention is to provide a transfer device where there is no physical contact with a food product when transferring it from an end to end orientation to a side-by-side orientation.
A still further objective of the present invention is to provide a conveying system with a reversible self-contained vibrating device.
An objective of the present invention is to provide flexibility in delivery to accommodate changing capacity demands such as multiple loading devices.
Another objective of the present invention is to provide a food product handling system that handles a range of sizes (both length & diameter) to a loading device in an organized and consistent manner without tooling changes.
These and other objectives will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art based upon the following written description, drawings and claims.